This past Friday, Missouri celebrated an important milestone in historic preservation: the 40th anniversary of its State Hisoric Preservation Office. At the end of the quarterly meeting of the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, advisory council members joined current and former SHPO staffers and gathered well-wishers to toast the state's historic preservation efforts. On hand for the occasion were Orval Henderson, first director of the SHPO (then the Historic Planning and Survey Office) and Joseph Jaeger, former Director of the Missouri State Park Board and Missouri State Liaison Officer. Henderson and Jaeger were instrumental forces in transforming the small Historic Planning and Survey Office into a full-fledged State Historic Preservation Office.

Current director of the Missouri Department of Natural ResourcesDoyle Childers welcomes the crowd.

In 1966, the U.S. Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Historic Preservation Act that established the National Register of Historic Places as well as authorizing SHPO programs in each of the 50 states. Missouri was the first state to receive the Department of the Interior's recognition as an official SHPO under the Historic Preservation Act.

Doug Eiken speaks.

Forty years later, Missouri has listed over 1,815 sites and districts on the National Register to include some 21,000 individual resources. The Missouri Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, established in 1998, leads the nation for amount of activity under state historic rehab tax credit programs. Now under the direction of Mark Miles, the Missouri SHPO has much to celebrate and even more accomplishments ahead.